Jason,

I did submit a service request and was then contacted by support.  I was able to show examples of the slide show gadget positioning problems and we began to troubleshoot.  I have not heard back from the development team on any solutions yet.

mchv2.0,

Where is the Sharepoint Designer? (this could be something I use all the time and not refer to it as the Sarepoint Designer).  What does the <p> do?

<p> = paragraph so it basically just creates a line break. Competent browsers will render it that way but it's hard to explain how IE renders things. It may be basing the amount of break to make on the height of the slideshow, hence the problem. In other words it's incorrectly adding the height of the slideshow as a line before the slideshow starts.

Since the problem has been identified and all the code is generated dynamically off the asp code running on the 365 servers, it would be easy to fix globally by removing the p tags or replacing them with a br tag and rolling that out. But only MSFT can do that......... 

Microsoft has contacted me with some options and where to obtain Sharepoint Designer.  I will update this thread when I have a chance.

An unfortunate workaround from support:

"After obtaining as much additional information as I've been able, the unanimous response for this issue has come back to the site layout itself. Whether by making modifications to the gadget code, such as through SharePoint Designer, or through additional zones to help lock the gadget into a specific location, we've been seeing this issue appearing occasionally, and solely with the Slideshow. As we've been provided a few different workarounds that have been tested and confirmed to resolve the issue, though, this is the direction we're going to need to take to resolve this on your site."

The gadget worked fine in OLSB by following the paragraph styles.  I am bummed out that this is not the case anymore.

Geez, it would probably take 5 minutes to correct the underlying code. Instead they're suggesting users unfamiliar with Sharepoint Designer go in and change things themselves, which will probably lead to other things getting broken. And of course none of them will be "supported" because they require "custom coding". 

Since the slideshow is part of the ui editor and therfore IS supported but doesn't work properly - shouldn't it be fixed? 

Yes.  It is part of the UI, connected to the service, and therefore connected to the subscription cost.  YES it should be fixed.  This is a tool, which is being paid for, that is not working properly.

Having unpredictable published content on the web is UNPROFESSIONAL and EMBARRASSING.

I need help with Sharepoint Designer:  it seems to only work with sites that are on a server?  How do I begin to work on my site?

Open it, click open site and enter your url.

Look for All Files>>Pages and open the page to edit - click "yes" to open in advanced mode.

Look for "slideshow control" in the code and you'll see a <p> tag in front of it. When you delete that the orphaned closing tag will be highlighted so delete that.

There's more info about using SPD here 

After clicking open is when I get confused.  Where does the All Files folder come from?  I enter my URL and a warning comes up stating thefolder name is not valid.  The first time I did this I was asked to sign in.

I did log in and there was no result the first time, but I began to question the exact address that I entered:

Here is what I have tried in order today.  I cant remember what I started with yesterday:

Site Name:  (set up domain was TremainDesign and now is Tremain-Design.com

www.tremaindesign.sharepoint.com

www.tremaindesign.onmicrosoft.com

www.tremain-design.sharepoint.com

www.tremain-design.onmicrosoft.com

www.TremainDesign.onmicrosoft.com

www.TremainDesign.sharepoint.com

www.Tremain-Design.onmicrosoft.com

www.Tremain-Design.sharepoint.com

http://www.tremain-design.com/  <-- this finally presented the log in screen again and it worked.  Makes sense that it would simply be the address, but what would of helped me was to include the "http://"  I can see files and folders now and navigate to the first page in question, but...

I am presented with these errors on all the pages that I begin to edit:

(note to microsoft support) THIS IS WHY WORK-AROUNDS ARE NEVER A GOOD IDEA

So you see the slideshow  control code and are just removing the <p> before it and the </p> after it and then you see the errors? The error suggests you've removed something else that's required.

And you're right - it's nuts that we have to jump through these hoops to fix something  that MSFT agrees is broken. We're forced to resort to custom hacks like this which they'll say are "unsupported" because we're using custom code. 

Here's where you want to be:

<p><iws:slideshowcontrol xmlns:iws="iws" id="SlideshowControl1"------------------------------

-------------------------------------------</iws:slideshowcontrol></p>

The errors show upon editing the page (before seeing any code).

Hiya, Just wandering wether you have resolved your problem? As I have exactly the same issue and have been unable to rectify it!! I have got as far as this and it is soooo frustrating! I have re-built from scratch but identical to the office live site and as i have spent hours on it inserting and coordinating the images on our galleries I dread the thought of having to start all over again only to have the same problem!

Any ideas would be greatful.

Many thanks.